TECH EDUCATION Girl Develop It creates learning environment for women to get more of them into a programming industry dominated by men

Alyssa Ravasid (left) and Julie Dequaire collaborate during an Introduction to Javascript workshop.

Photo By Michael Macor/The Chronicle

Nicola Ginzler attends the Javascript class in San Francisco. The meet-up workshops for women are sponsored by Girl Develop It.

Photo By Michael Macor/The Chronicle

Liz Howard introduces a class of women to Javascript, one of the most common computer languages used by startup tech companies. Software development jobs are expected to grow faster than other jobs.

Photo By Michael Macor/The Chronicle

Liz Howard instructs the group of women attending the seminar on the Introduction to Javascript Workshop at the Citizen Space on Second St. on Thursday Jan. 10, 2013, in San Francisco, Calif. Girl Develop It San Francisco sponsors the meet-up workshops directly focused on woman.

"I'm impressed by how many of you made it four nights in a row," Liz Howard tells the class of 17 women she's teaching on a recent night in San Francisco.

They are sitting in front of laptops at a shared work space in SOMA, their screens displaying lines and lines of computer code. At the front of the room, a big screen projects slides on concepts like loops, arrays and states.

Howard's class is on JavaScript, one of the most common computer languages used by startup tech companies, and is put on by Girl Develop It, an organization dedicated to getting women involved with programming. The invite for the event advertises Girl Develop It's 850-plus "nerdettes" and noted the evening comes complete "with childcare."

Howard acknowledges that there are plenty of coding classes out there, but in approaching a predominantly male profession, many women prefer to learn without the typical "bravado," as she termed the hyper-competitive nature of coding groups or hackathons.

Girl Develop It works to create an environment where women can not only feel comfortable asking questions, but also build a stronger network for female coders.

Bright future

It's no secret the future bodes well for programmers. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics expects software development jobs in the United States to total 1.2 million by 2020, up 30 percent from 2010, a rate of growth much faster than the average for all other occupations. Predictably, much of that engineering growth is expected in California. As of 2011, BLS statistics show, California engineers earned the profession's highest mean salary in the country ($128,300 in the San Jose and Sunnyvale area).

Yet, data from the National Science Foundation shows those taking up the profession are male by a ratio of almost 3 to 1. Even so, one would be hard-pressed to find a Silicon Valley tech firm where the ratio of male to female engineers is close to that.

Classes spring up

In addition to San Francisco, Girl Develop It holds classes in less tech-centric cities like Detroit and Philadelphia, and it certainly isn't the only organization of its type. RailsBridge teaches the Ruby on Rails programming language to women around San Francisco. The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology partners with organizations like Google, IBM and National Security Agency to increase women's participation in technology-related fields.

Online, independent of gender, there are no shortages of tools to learn computer code. MIT and Stanford University post videos of their programming classes. Startups like Codecademy offer interactive courses. Blogs like DailyJS and other forums offer free tips and guidance on troubleshooting. The website repl.it offers free online software that lets you build code.

Empowered by coding

Why should learning to code be important to more women? Ask Leslie Fishlock, founder of GeekGirl.

Her organization, which teaches classes and holds conferences around the country, got started in 2008 after Fishlock became "so frustrated hearing stories of woe from bright, articulate women who did not know the basics of computers and the Internet (and) had a penchant for being taken advantage of by computer gimmicks and overly anxious sales clerks."

Software is rarely shipped with all the tools one may want. Being able to code - provided the software allows it - empowers users to build the features they want, like a specific tool to block ads on a website.

And as more businesses move operations online, knowing basic coding concepts gives job applicants a leg up - even if their position doesn't require writing software. Not to mention that being able to code provides tools to sort through the reams of data that companies are collecting to learn about their customers.

1st programmers

Looking back, women have a quiet but important history in coding. In the 1840s, Ada Lovelace worked on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine - a mechanical precursor to the modern computer - and is often called "the first programmer."

While a U.S. Naval officer, Grace Hopper developed the COBOL computing language in 1959 and is credited with creating the first compiler, the device that converts the words of a programming language into the 1s and 0s a computer reads.

In Howard's class, not everyone is completely new to coding. One says that she learned the language Python, but hopes to start a project with her husband soon that would require JavaScript. Five other members of the class had experience with other object-oriented languages, used to organize complex data.

That gives them a leg up here, because while programming languages may use different words and actions, the overarching concepts are usually similar. Just as a guitarist might learn the banjo faster than someone with no music experience, programmers pick up a second language much faster.

That doesn't necessarily translate into classroom perfection, though.

The students had been assigned the coding of a rudimentary word-guessing game. Some completed the task with beautiful lines of code, but others just didn't get the homework done.

Luckily for them, Howard and Girl Develop It are focused on bigger-picture goals.

Not to worry, Howard assures them: "You don't get a grade at the end of class."